Simply: What is some good free Wiki software that can be quickly/easily ported over to confluence?

More specifically: We need something free that we can use to build up a repository of documentation, possibly importing from our existing word documents and Perl POD documentation. We are using Atlassian's Jira, so the business owners will eventually want the option to switch to Confluence (so they can use it as a massive enterprise solution for everything), but for the immediate future, the developers really need something that can give them a lift with building easy-to-find code documentation, as it's becoming a training issue.

Thoughts: Knowing that Confluence uses MySQL, we could potentially use something that sits on top of that and attempt to convert in the future. I've found a few posts about scripts to convert MediaWiki to Confluence, and this Confluence plugin for importing content. I realize this is potentially subjective, but I didn't know if there was an obvious "duh" tool out there for quickly converting one system to another when it came to wiki content, specifically from anything to confluence, or if a universal conversion project existed that covered those needs.

3 Answers
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I'd take a look at the many wiki formats supported by the Universal Wiki Converter project run by Confluence. It's an actively maintained project and they do appear to be quite keen to ensure good results with a variety of input wikis. As torbeng mentioned, Foswiki is one option (previously called Twiki). I've done a conversion from Twiki to Confluence using the UWC and it did quite a reasonable job.

The main advice I would give you if you are writing it now is to stick to only the basic wiki features (since some of the more advanced features and markup may not be supported in the converter), and define some standard markup for your pages so that if necessary you can hack the source of the UWC to bend it to your will. Better still, decide on a format then do a dry run with UWC.

Also if you don't have many developers I think you can run a small Confluence server (10 users) for $10, so that may be the best option.

Foswiki is a good wiki tool in many respects. I'm not familiar with a direct Foswiki-to-Confluence export option, but one strength of Foswiki is that all wiki pages are stored in simple TXT files (one file per page) and attachments to each page are stored in a subfolder with the page's name. Foswiki uses simple markup and supports full HTML tags as well.

Because of this data simplicity, it's very easy to move the content elsewhere later on.

Foswiki is very flexible and has many other nice bells&whistles too, but I wanted to suggest it to you specifically because of the easy data storage.

UWC's support varies greatly from wiki to wiki. I'm currently fighting with pmWiki migration, and the converter.pmwiki.properties is extremely incomplete and hasn't been touched in a year. Eg dokuwiki seems to be better supported.

If you like confluence, then the best is to run confluence directly: an eval license (you can renew), or the $10 license